Something else that strikes me is, FT and SX are one day events. Cheaper to attend for fans who want to see in it's entirety, than RR being a whole weekend dedicated to the event. Hotels, food, transport, even personal time, that kinda adds up, and can be prohibitive for some folks. I'm not saying RR needs to be shortened, just a thought.

Something else that strikes me is, FT and SX are one day events. Cheaper to attend for fans who want to see in it's entirety, than RR being a whole weekend dedicated to the event. Hotels, food, transport, even personal time, that kinda adds up, and can be prohibitive for some folks. I'm not saying RR needs to be shortened, just a thought.

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I feel that will happen sooner than later as a test to prove a concept.

The RR numbers are in the 2019 Sponsorship slides on the Motoamerica registration slides. 2018 had 703k viewers of 10 races so 70k TV viewers per race on average. They list 2.7M watched at least 1 minute of one of the races. I guess that’s some Nielsen metric. Barber was down at 26k viewers likely related to some cable carriers dropping Bein at the end. YouTube had 1.2M viewers and Facebook another 162k viewers.

Race attendance looked like it was around 15k per race with big increases at COTA and Laguna Seca joint race weekends and drops in the rain.

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I'm a Comcast subscriber. BeIn/Comcast didn't come to an agreement and the channel slid off of the grid sometime in the middle of the year. I was more than happy to wait for the broadcast to come up on YouTube to watch.
Did they ever introduce the technology that allows the Nielson ratings to factor in when a show is watched on DVR rather than live?

At one point when we were given attendance data, we also had the track's information on tickets sold/given away. A single ticket for Friday, Saturday and Sunday actually counted for three attendees. Each person, each day was an attendee. (Granted, not every ticket sold was a three day pass, but a lot of them were.) Actual humans in attendance each day and was about a third of the reported attendance number.

Road America was pretty packed last year. Reminded me kinda of the old days. It was pretty cool. No stunt show up and down highway 67 or campers on fire in the camp ground across the street... but people were partying.

How much work do each one of these guys do to get people to the race track? They could have a strong impact in marketing / promoting the race series in getting fans in the stands if they structure their posts accordingly.

How much work do each one of these guys do to get people to the race track? They could have a strong impact in marketing / promoting the race series in getting fans in the stands if they structure their posts accordingly.

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It’s 2018 (soon to be 2019). I think guys like Josh have realized in order to have a job, he needs to promote the series. He promotes the series (and himself), people come to see him. More fans = more leverage at contract time. Win / win.

Besides being fast, I’m pretty sure Yoshimura / Suzuki is looking at that. Josh could put their products in front of a lot of faces who many not normally come across it.

I overheard him tell Roger that IG has been the best thing for him and maybe his career reboot.

We’re arguing about getting locals to the track, when in fact you need names like Josh Herrin, JD, etc putting their name and face out there and creating content. Like Kyle Wyman (10.6k followers) should do more drift videos on a Harley bagger. Content like that that reaches outside the road racing echo chamber.

For example with JD, you can’t look up motorcycle racing in the US right now without coming across his name. I have a buddy who wouldn’t know any of this existed, except for Josh Herrin.

The days of being a dry robot racer who can get by on talent alone is over. Auto racing is no different. It takes talent and charisma (and a good social media team, or yourself).

Speaking of sponsorship, I tried to acquire FBF (Ferracci) when I was invited to ride for Team Maxxis/BEi Racing.
Described Billy's set-up, mentioned magazine ads, etc. First words out of Ferraccis' mouth - "Are these races televised?"
No deal.
He did, however, offer contingency. Slap FBF stickers on the bike(s), $250 per win, payable in money received on account. I took advantage of that with my sprint program a couple years earlier.

Anyone racing SBK probably spent a few thousand $ on a race flash already. Spending that on a spec ECU instead is an ez choice for me. But ya, I’m prob not the norm and I could see it keeping locals out of SBK.